Transition Plan Enters New Phase

Andrew Sullivan

IAB Chair

10 Mar 2016

Many of us have been working over the last two years on a small change to the way the IANA functions are managed.

Today, IANA is operated by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) under a contract from the US Department of Commerce (though the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, or NTIA). But the plan has always been for the NTIA to step out of that role, and about two years ago they asked the Internet community to put together the detailed proposal for how to complete the plan.

We have now passed an important milestone. The various operational communities — for names, numbers, and protocol parameters — have come together and produced a unified proposal under which IANA stewardship can be performed by the Internet community. The proposal keeps in place the same operational realities that have supported the Internet’s enormous growth since the 1990s. The arrangements are really the same ones that have always been in place: they work, and there is no reason to change them. The NTIA has the proposal, and is now following the procedure to evaluate it.

The proposal is yet another piece of evidence that the multi-stakeholder way works. We’re not done yet, of course, but we are very happy that the next phase of the transition process has begun.